Will Today’s Twitter “News” Help the New gTLDs?

I was watching CNBC this afternoon when I heard the commentators discussing a report about an acquisition bid for Twitter. It was later reported that the article discussing this bid was found on what seems to be a fake Bloomberg website. My first thought was about whether the fake website was operating on a new gTLD domain name to confuse people into believing it was associated with the financial news company. It reminded me of the TMZ.today story.

According to an article appearing on Newsweek this afternoon, “Someone went through great lengths to publish a fake report about Twitter, registering and creating the website “Bloomberg.market,” a near replica of Bloomberg.com.”

CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla tweeted out a link to the report this afternoon:

Interestingly, it seems that the Bloomberg.market domain name was registered under privacy earlier this month.

Although I believe this reflects poorly on the new gTLD program, I wonder if it will actually have a positive impact on the new gTLD domain names. I wonder how many people who had never heard about .Market domain names now know that .Market exists. Of course, people could think negatively about the extension because of what happened, but I think market awareness has been a major issue for the new gTLD program.

It will be interesting to see if there is a jump in .Market domain name registrations in the coming days.

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That domain certainly triggered the TMCH. It will be interesting to see how quickly the site is taken down.

The .market clone uses the same analytics code as the real site. I don’t think GA is designed to track multiple domains with the same code by default, so I’m not sure Bloomberg could have seen the clone site in their GA reports.

Well look at it this way. I didn’t even know about .market yet since I had not closely scrutinized the whole list of the many hundreds of new gTLDs really, but once I found out it exists as a result of this story I was determined to try to reg at least one.

Perhaps I’m taking an over simplistic view, however IMO, if more events like this become a trend, then such events will have a negative impact (as investments). As everyone knows, the major challenge with new domain extensions is raising awareness of them. If more stories such as this where scammers use extensions for illegitimate purposes, this will only leave a bad taste in the mouth of Joe public, for years to come. It will likely only strengthen the trust (and value) in .com’s as the average internet user (particularly the baby boomers) will be even more cautious to visit sites that don’t have the .com.

In a time where the public is only now becoming familiar with how to spot scam domains when opening up their email or browser(s) (ie: mybankofamerica1.com) It will really begin to get messy if the public is expected to now be able to spot bankofamerica.menu)

Like any other facet of technology, the domain industry has always been leaps and bounds ahead of the public. Personally, I do see some potential with a few of the new extensions. However, we can only speculate how people will adopt. In terms of every day application, this will be a huge shift in how we collectively use the internet. The shift that is required for gtld’s to produce consistent returns for domain investors may not even happen. Or, if it does begin to happen on a consistent basis, domain extensions may be replaced altogether with some type of technological paradigm shift. In a sense, the industry is shooting itself in the foot, as this problem is only compounded by the huge number of extensions that are being released. This has always been the fear and this is why strong, legit, brandable .com’s will increase in value, as the flood of other extensions become available. This is why domain investors are often so divisive when it comes to the gtld debate.

What the new gTLDs need right now is user awareness, and that’s what they got with this case. People won’t link scams and new gTLDs together. Even though there are certainly someone in this forum clinging on to the hope 😉

I strongly disagree. I think most serous domain investors would absolutely love to have gtld’s be successful. Why wouldn’t we want them to be? More assets = more inventory and opportunity to sell. I feel that the concern and popular dislike regarding gtlds stems from the unknown of whether they will impact current (and future) investments in a negative way. The Bloomerg story represents one of those negative complications. Bad publicity (especially when it comes to the internet and scams) doesn’t necessarily equate good publicity for instilling trust with the general public. Half of the internet was practically built on attempting to eradicate the fear of online scams and spam. I would say that gtld’s are still a big unknown for investors, but no doubt will be great for internet security and spam prevention startups.

Yes, I was also feeling that some may just be jumping on the opportunity to bash new gTLDs that way.

This is an isolated incident. “.Market” was obviously particularly usable for a hoax like that, not the vast majority of other TLDs.

The “no publicity is bad publicity” concept really does apply here to some degree, even though there is also a two-edged sword element that has to be dealt with. And clearly the registry has dealt with it.

Some of the new gTLDs are gems, some still very nice if not gems, and if domain investors really do want them to succeed then they should seek to support the concept if not every single individual TLD. And let’s face it – a lot of the “legacy” TLDs that have been around so long are frankly quite boring and antiseptic rather than unquestionably superior or more desirable than some of the new ones. There are definitely new ones, especially when you start talking about specific SLD/TLD combinations.

Why do you all continue to waste your time talking about the new gtlds? Can’t you just let them wither up and die as they eventually are destined to do? They suck. They are stupid. They are expensive yet have no resale value. They are confusing. They leak. They allow for impersonation scams like this. There lies nothing good in their future. Sorry, just being honest here.

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